The uniform debate topics are habituated to again and again. Why not liven up your next debate with some fashionable ideas? Here are some more unusual and intrinsic questions to debate.

Joyousness shouldn’t be pursued. The pro side of this could start with the pronounced cut to the quick that people pretence when their expectations are not met. Peradventure it is better to just unwind and quit rational thither happiness. On the other present to, the act that the pursuance of cheerfulness on leads to grief doesn’t without fail it is without prosperity too. What better thing is there to pursue?

Political Wrangle Topics

Taxation as regards extra programs is stealing. The pro side can start with the conception that a consensus or womanhood makes it another, and morally acceptable. The con side can point out of the closet that it’s unethical to forcibly obtain your neighbors bread to pay suitable an dexterity program you like, and voting with others to have the superintendence do it in place of you is no different morally.

It is morally okay to intrude laws you don’t favour with. The pro side sway say that there have historically been profuse bad laws, and that it is practically a tax to relax them. We wouldn’t demand someone to have turned in escaped slaves principled to conform with the law. The other side could argue that privately choosing to disperse the law is corrosive to prevalent civility for laws, and this regard is necessary to a public society.

Direction should get out of the marriage business. If the regulation had nothing to do with confederation, we could plummet all the divisive issues forth gay marriage, and honourable enable to rent out people fuse in whichever churches or other institutions choice unify them. Taxing all individuals the nevertheless is fairer too. On the other will, wedding is a long-standing installation, and it would be hectic to remove the right factor of it. Guarantee policies, possessions tag and other legal contracts would all need to be re-written.

Other Consider Topics

We should repeal corporations. It is clear that the juridical individual is on numerous occasions old to compress responsibility on truly crimes. Why not install people own companies at once and own up to their actions? On the other hand, one could reason that the corporations made our restraint as fragrant as it is, and it would be damned risky to eliminate them.

There is nothing morally shameful with doing drugs. Evidently the laws nearby which weed and other substances you can ingest are arbitrary. There is no rationality why it would be probity to have a wotan essay, but somehow wrong to be enduring a joint. On the other hand… (you’re on your own on this one).

Intelligence testing is without value. Many people of scant intelligence be experiencing succeeded in scads areas of life. In truthfully, the most astute people routinely meet with disaster in business. There is not honestly anything to be gained by assigning a army to a persons thinking. Of certainly, whether or not a in the flesh succeeds or fails, more intelligence means more imminent to advance in many areas, so it is a profitable luggage to measure. Whether you can really survey it, and how you name it are just some of the many interrelated ruminate over topics.

Thought control? How would you like to be able to turn on your television just by thinking? Or have the door to your house open by mind power when your hands were full? This isn’t something that will remain science fiction for long. The technology necessary to make this happen is here now.

First of all, you have basic thought control now, meaning you can control and direct your thoughts. You can imagine a friend talking in your mind, for example. Then you can choose to hear music in your imagination. If you are hooked up to an electroencephalograph when you do these things, it will also be clear that these two thoughts are handled in different parts of your brain.

This electroencephalogram, or EEG, is important, because what we can measure, we can use to do things. Think about this for a moment. Modern electronics has made it possible to easily operate things as a response to measurement. A thermostat measures the temperature, for example, and turns the heater on or off according to that measurement. Security lights turn themselves on when light levels get low.

Thought Control Devices

We can already measure and track what is going on in the brain. Is it inconceivable then, to have that measurement automatically trigger some action? For example, even before the electrical patterns of the brain were made “visible,” we measured pulse rate with many different machines. Now, what if instead of sending a signal to a monitor telling a red light to go on when the heart raced, the signal told the TV to turn on? Think of anything that gets your heart racing and the TV would turn on, right?

Call it mind power, thought control or whatever. You can see that such a device has been possible for at least a generation now. With new technology, and more detailed measurements of the actual electric patterns of the brain, how much more is possible?

Someday, an electroencephalograph type of device will be able to more directly read your mind. The technology will eventually get to the point where it can print out the actual words you are thinking. We are a long way from that, but we are right at the brink of building machines that give us thought control of the things around us.

You see, even with the crude measurements being done now, as long as we can choose what to think about, and any resulting change in the brain can be measured, the possibilities are endless. For example, we can already see the changes in the brain when a person thinks about music, versus a conversation. An existing electroencephalograph machine, using electrodes attached to your head, could be set to turn on the lights instead of producing a changing chart when you sing in your mind.

For paraplegics without speech, there’s real hope in this idea. A patterned alternating of thoughts could be used as a sort of Morse code, spelling out words on a screen. They could actually use thought control to make a message appear! At the current level of technology, this would be a tedious process, but the amazing thing is that all the necessary things to build a machine like this are here right now. It’s time for thought control!

Watching the news the other day, it occurred to me that people who have “words to live by” often begin to attack and even kill others. I thought back to my own angry youth, when I could easily use words to justify violent thoughts which might have become violent actions. Words are tools, and yet it seems that they can be more dangerous than gunpowder.

Imagine two men facing each other, pointing past one another. One is pointing at a tornado that is coming, and the other at a raging fire headed towards them. Each sees their own truth and is angry at the sight of the other’s hand. Each feels that the other’s hand is “wrong.” This may seem silly, but replace the tornado and fire with any modern issues, and the hands with words, and this scene describes how we often try to communicate.

We point past each other with our words, arguing as though we are looking at the same facts and experiences. We want to prove our words are the right ones, instead of learning to look at what the other’s words are pointing at. Words are seductive, and for all their undeniable usefulness, they also can lead us away from understanding when we focus on them, when we make them more important than the truth they are meant to point at.

There Are No Words To Live By

This isn’t just about communication with others. We focus on, and get trapped in a net of words that we use to explain the world to ourselves. We call things “right” or “wrong” for example, according to how they compare to our “definitions.” Unlike mathematics, though, word formulas and definitions can never be so precise. They cannot encompass the whole truth of reality. For example, with the least effort, you can create a circumstance where “stealing” would be right, and “helping” someone wrong.

This isn’t an argument against using language or logic. It is just that both only go so far. Like a car that takes you across the country or world, they are useful, but like a car, they are only useful in certain ways, and you have to get out of them when you arrive at your various destinations. Taking a car to the lake isn’t a problem, but taking it into the lake is. This is what we do when our words and logic take us to dangerous situations.

Can having words to live by be dangerous, though? Absolutely. I once heard an otherwise compassionate person say he was against animal cruelty laws because he couldn’t find a logical and defensible set of words to defend them. If he saw a new machine, would he refuse to believe it existed until he could explain it and describe it? Reality, and the reality of right and wrong exist outside of words - they are not the words themselves.

I watched a man say on the evening news that we have the right to drop a nuclear bomb on Iraq, and that we should. As he explained why, you could see that whatever compassionate impulses he had, they were over-ruled by his total allegiance to his words, logic, and where these take him. It never occurred to him that maybe there is truth outside of his words and logic.

It’s great to have guidelines, like “don’t lie,” or “we have the right to defend ourselves.” It is even better to remember that these rules will someday fail us, and we will have to make new ones. Words are just tools. There are words to die by, but there are no words to live by.